Owlstone Medical launches Breath Biopsy Kits

Owlstone Medical, a diagnostics company developing a breathalyzer for disease, today announced the launch of its Breath Biopsy® Kits, based on the company’s proprietary Breath Biopsy platform. The new product range allows academic, clinical and pharmaceutical researchers to quickly discover and validate breath-based biomarkers in early detection and precision medicine research activities.

Owlstone Medical’s Breath Biopsy platform is a new diagnostic modality capable of detecting biomarkers of disease, and also exogenous compounds such as volatile drug metabolites, in breath. The company’s ReCIVA Breath Sampler and new Breath Biopsy Kits ensure consistent and reliable collection of breath samples. VOC (Volatile Organic Compound) biomarkers present in breath can be analyzed with high sensitivity and selectivity in Owlstone Medical’s Breath Biopsy Services Laboratory, or in a researcher’s own laboratory.

Billy Boyle, co-founder and CEO at Owlstone Medical, said: “Our goal is to help realize the potential of breath biopsy and make it accessible to the widest research base. By launching kits we are making the process of collecting and analyzing a sample of breath as straightforward as possible and ensuring high quality and reproducible results. We want to help researchers to be successful as this will, in turn, lead to more breath biopsy tests being developed and further establish breath biopsy as a new industry category across of broad range of applications in early disease detection and precision medicine.”

Availability of Breath Biopsy Kits makes breath biopsy widely accessible to clinical researchers and pharma companies including those without ‘in house’ analytical capability for breath samples and without being required to purchase high cost capital equipment. Breath Biopsy Kits are available to cover the entire process from discovery to validation of VOC biomarkers:- Breath Biopsy Collection Kits enable researchers to collect reliable breath samples that can then be analyzed in their own laboratory using instrumentation such as the Lonestar VOC Analyzer from Owlstone Medical.- Breath Biopsy Discovery VOC Kits include the consumables required for breath collection, as well as a comprehensive global breath VOC analysis performed in Owlstone Medical’s Breath Biopsy Services Laboratory to enable broad discovery of VOC biomarkers in breath.- Breath Biopsy Target VOC Kits include the consumables required for breath collection, as well as a targeted analysis of specific VOC biomarkers by Owlstone Medical’s Breath Biopsy Services to enable validation of biomarker classifiers.

The Breath Biopsy Kits contain high quality consumables for use with the ReCIVA Breath Sampler: including a Breath Biopsy Cartridge to collect, stabilize and enrich VOCs in breath, enhancing the sensitivity for detection of VOCs, and a disposable Breath Biopsy Mask. All kit components are manufactured and quality checked to the exacting standards required for the analysis of VOC biomarkers in breath. ReCIVA Breath Samplers are available for purchase or to lease.

By choosing to send samples to Owlstone Medical’s Breath Biopsy Services Laboratory for analysis, scientists can benefit from the world’s largest Breath Biopsy digital biobank, to further explore biomarker classifiers and gain valuable insights into potential performance in larger patient populations.

Dr. Stephen Fowler, Senior Lecturer and Honorary Consultant in Respiratory Medicine at the University of Manchester said: "The European asthma research innovation partnership (EARIP) recently highlighted the potential of VOCs to assist phenotyping asthma and predicting major clinical outcomes such as exacerbations and response to treatment. Owlstone Medical’s Breath Biopsy Discovery VOC Kits could help overcome a major road block for the large scale studies that are required to get breath into clinical practice by facilitating standardization of both sampling and analytical methods."

Professor Chris Mayhew, Director of the Institute for Breath Research at the University of Innsbruck, commented: “The ability to run targeted analysis of specific VOCs of interest and to have access to large patient populations via the Breath Biopsy digital biobank will enable us to greatly speed up the process of validating the VOC biomarkers we have identified in our previous studies.”